The Return

Give the man his due, then read the fine print.

Destination Medical Center did what it said it would do downtown. Since 2013, more than $2.1 billion in private money has gone into the district. For every public dollar committed, private investment put in more than six. Fifteen city blocks redeveloped. Downtown housing more than doubled. Anyone who tells you DMC failed isn't looking at downtown.

I'm not that candidate. I read the reports. The core worked.

The question I'm asking is the one the reports raise on their own — once you get past the headline number.

One number built almost all of last year's growth. It wasn't the neighborhoods.

2025 was a record: about $348 million in new private investment in the DMC district. Here's what the headline skips. Of that $348 million, $342 million was Mayo Clinic — its own expansion, on its own campus. That leaves roughly $6 million from everyone else. Every other business, every other developer, every other project in the district, combined.

That's not a one-year blip. Non-Mayo private investment in the district has slipped for seven years running. The city's own paper reports it. The DMC board acknowledges it and points to construction disruption as the cause.

I'll say the part that doesn't make the press release: an engine running on one cylinder is still a risk, no matter how strong that cylinder is. When one institution is nearly all of your private investment, the neighborhoods that aren't Mayo are waiting for a return that keeps getting pushed to next year's report.

See the numbers yourself on openRochester →

The first decade built the core. The second decade comes home.

The deal Rochester made was never "make downtown nice." It was "grow the whole city." Downtown was supposed to be the start, not the finish. Halfway through a twenty-year initiative, the core is built and the return to the rest of the city is the unfinished half.

That's what The Return means. Not a new program — a redirect. The same growth, aimed at the wards that carried the disruption and are still waiting on the payoff:

• Streets and basics in the neighborhoods, not just the district — the maintenance that got deferred while the marquee projects got built.
• Housing people who already live here can afford — the affordable units DMC's own board keeps naming as the gap, actually delivered.
• Small-business corridors outside the core — the non-Mayo investment that's been declining for seven years doesn't come back on its own. It needs a city that goes and gets it.

Ward 1. Ward 5. The southeast side. The northwest side. Every part of Rochester that reads the record and asks, fairly, when it's our turn.

This is where a mayor is not a spectator.

The mayor doesn't run DMC alone, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the office is far from powerless here, and I'll use every part of it:

• The mayor sits at the DMC table. I'll use that seat to push the agency's recruitment toward the corridors and wards that have been waiting — the non-Mayo investment that's been sliding is exactly what DMC's economic development staff exists to go recruit.
• The mayor sets the public agenda. I'll put the composition question on the record — how much of this year's growth reached the neighborhoods — every year, in public, before the Council votes on the city's share.
• The mayor appoints and nominates. The people who carry the city's voice into these rooms get chosen by the mayor. I'll choose people who count the whole city.
• The mayor moves a Council vote by moving the public. The pieces that need seven Council votes — I'll bring them the daylight and the pressure to get there, and I'll tell you plainly which fights those are.

Demonstrated, not promised: I already built the tool that shows you this record — openRochester — before I asked for a single vote. That's how I'll run the office. Show the work, then do the work.